Number Eight. Just the News. DOE announces $150 million training package for energy efficiency contractors.
In an effort to keep everyone hyper-focused on green energy and not focused at all on massive charges of international bribery, influence-selling, and domestic weaponization of the Department of Justice, the Biden administration announced this week a paltry $150 million federal grant program to certify that residential building contractors know the best ways to build residential buildings.
The point is to make homes healthier and more energy efficient, which is why the grant applicants must detail how the grant will be used to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, which we all know are the critical components for tasks like, say, installing new energy-efficient windows and non-recyclable solar panels.
Buried within the press release is the statement that after the $150 million in grants is spent to certify that workers have been trained, the funds available to retrofit and electrify residences is $8.8 billion. This amount was authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which aims to increase inflation by spending $500 billion to ensure the IRS is up to the job of ensuring taxpayer compliance. And also maybe fix the climate crisis once and for all.
What exactly making the IRS more efficient at collecting taxes has to do with making homes healthier and more energy efficient through the use of unreliable and expensive green electricity remains something of a mystery.
But it can’t be wrong, because it’s for the planet.
Number Seven. PJ Media. Yes, really: Texas University offers degrees in victim studies.
Sam Houston State University is leading the way. It claims to offer the very first-in-the-nation Department of Victim Studies. Lest you think this is about studying the bodies of pedestrians run over by cars or something, no. This is about developing a passion for issues pertaining to victimization and sharing that passion with like-minded victim-oriented students and professors, presumably with a view toward… well, that part remains a little unclear. But it’s the first in the nation.
Community involvement for students is promoted through the Crime Victim Services Alliance and the Crime Victim Institute, part of taxpayer-funded Sam Houston State University Victim Studies Department.
All in all, this program helps students understand victims and victimology and prepares them for a lifetime of understanding the victim experience by immersing themselves in the study of victimhood.
I would love to know what the original Sam Houston would have thought of this. As I recall, when his people were victimized by Santa Anna at the Alamo in 1836, Sam failed miserably to live up to the noble expectations of compliant victimhood, and instead, at the Battle of San Jacinto, wiped out Santa Anna’s forces with guns and bloody bayonets. So much for Texas victimology.
Number Six. The Blaze. Algebra 1 effectively eliminated from Harvard-area middle schools.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools have discovered that accelerated math classes have suffered the humiliation of being overrun with white and Asian students, while conventional grade level classes are populated mostly with blacks and Hispanics. This was reason enough to eliminate the accelerated classes, as it had resulted in an “achievement gap.”
Presumably, an achievement gap occurs when one student does better in a subject than another student. Which is clearly an aberration of nature, as we all know that we are and ought to be all perfectly identical to one another in natural mathematics capability.
When nature is circumvented by some snotty know-it-all jump-up who is really good at factoring binomials, this creates an achievement gap, which leads to an opportunity gap. The school district sees its role as closing such pernicious gaps.
Thus, Algebra I is no longer included in the 8th-grade curriculum. Students are offered the opportunity to take a summer class in Algebra I, which will entitle him or her to move on to higher math classes in high school, including calculus, but actually taking that summer Algebra I course is discouraged by the district.
Because gaps.
Not having the chance to learn higher math skills will kill students’ chances of being accepted at universities such as Harvard, which by the way is in the same town. But Cambridge Public Schools is doing its best to see that none of their students will be qualified to attend, because of the dreaded achievement gap, so detrimental to polite society.
Number Five. The Daily Caller. Here are the left-wing initiatives stuffed in California’s math framework.
This is becoming something of an arithmetic competition. Massachusetts is subtracting Algebra and California is adding social justice.
The California Board of Education recently adopted new guidelines for teaching K-12 math, and the focus is all about adjusting the material to the students’ “lived experiences.” There is apparently no focus on adjusting the students’ “lived experiences” to the study of mathematics.
Their starting point seems to be that marginalized students, who apparently make up most of the population, will remain marginalized until they are taught in ways that confirm their marginalization.
As a strategy to escape marginalization, this one may lack some ingredients.
Terms like “equitable and engaging,” “culturally responsive,” and “meaning-making” feature prominently in the California BOE framework.
I’m not sure what “meaning-making” is, but I suspect it does not have much to do with finding the value of x in a simple equation, like “3x = 12, solve for x.”
Number Four. Washington Examiner. Teaching biology could get you fired.
College is the place where rational young adults explore new ideas and let themselves be challenged with unfamiliar intellectual stimuli. A class such as human anatomy and physiology dives deep into the physical makeup of a human being, bringing to students’ attention decades of explanatory research.
That’s why the one thing that must never be taught is the actual physical makeup of a human being, especially when it concerns which chromosomes make a boy and which make a girl.
That was what got Professor Johnson Varkey fired from St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, Texas, where he had taught for 20 years. When an X and Y chromosome appear together, the good professor was bold to assert, the resulting embryo is a boy. When they are X and X, it is a girl. (I hope his lecture actually went deeper than that in his college class. I recall hearing the XX, XY thing in 8th grade.)
After such an irresponsibly violent attack on common sense by this completely nut case professor who held rabidly to his understanding of chromosomes which has dominated the study of physiology for 200 years — in fact, ever since we knew there was such thing as a chromosome — students apparently ran screaming from the lecture hall, perhaps with hands clapped over their ears, shouting “LA LA LA LA LA!”
This is not the first time Professor Varkey has been in trouble. There have been complaints about his opinions of transgenderism (he thinks it’s bad), abortion (he thinks it’s bad), and it appears that he claims to be a Christian. Which of course is very bad.
But pointing out that Xs and Ys actually determine an objective gender, that took the cake. Is it possible — just barely possible — that there is way too much emphasis on sex, and not quite enough on science? All we’ve heard for about three years now is that we should “trust the science.”
Number Three. The Gateway Pundit. Nobel winner in science Dr. John Clauser: There is no climate crisis threatening the planet.
In the “We must silence this man!” department, we find that Dr. John Clauser, Nobel Laureate in Physics, has vitriolically criticized those he calls “science heretics” who push global warming and lead billions of earthlings into believing the lie of a climate crisis.
His 50-year-old study of cloud formations, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, shows that natural cloud cover stabilizes Earth’s temperature and is some 50 times more powerful than CO2 in the atmosphere.
In addition, he points out something I used to think we all knew, that carbon dioxide is required by plants, and that healthy plants, provided with CO2 and sunlight, actually produce oxygen. Which, because every creature in the world requires it to survive, is probably a net positive.
I don’t remember much from college, but I’m all over junior high school science class.
Especially the part where we shot down the planets suspended from the science lab ceiling by launching paperclips from a rubber band wrapped around the gooseneck faucet. But that’s probably not on-topic here.
Number Two. The Western Journal. Big oil sells wells in exchange for ESG points: Texan buys them all, makes billions.
The law of unintended consequences is alive and well and living large in west Texas.
Environmental, social, and governance investing — ESG — is the philosophy that those named characteristics ought to guide where a corporation’s resources are deployed. ESG focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion, social justice, racial balance and alternative-gender acceptance, among other helpful, altruistic and profit-strangling initiatives. Following ESG guidelines, so the theory goes, will create a better planet, happier people, and smoothly operating government structures.
For those of you who may be suspicious of smoothly operating government structures, let alone the notion that your limited cash should be used to make other people — not necessarily yourself — happy, or to chase the elusive dream of somehow making the planet better than it already is, you might like to hear this story.
Premier oil producers like Conoco Phillips, BP and Exxon Mobil have been selling off certain oil producing assets which do not fit the ESG paradigm. This makes their corporate holdings more ESG-friendly and thus presents a milder, more woke profile to the public, which owns their publicly-owned enterprises.
It also creates huge opportunity for someone like Jeffrey Hildebrand, CEO of Hilcorp Energy, a private company without stockholders whose hands must be held.
Hilcorp has been buying up those ESG-hostile oil wells and has used them to dramatically increase oil production. By 2026, Hilcorp is expected to be a top U.S. oil producer. Because it is privately owned, there are no investors to satisfy with an ESG score.
Jeffrey Hildebrand’s personal wealth has grown by $8 billion in the last three years. During the same time frame, incidentally, his holdings have reduced methane emissions by 35%.
Long live the free market!
Number One. 100 percent fed up. Democrat mayor created list of biggest critics and provided it to police.
There is nothing quite so honorable as an honest politician who comes clean with her real priorities. It’s a pleasure to see a big-city mayor honestly engage legitimate resources to solve what she sees as a legitimate problem.
Michelle Wu, mayor of Boston, has apparently been harassed and physically intimidated at her home and at local public events by people who apparently did not vote for her. It is not clear how serious the harassment was, but it rose to the level where she believed it needed to be brought to the attention of police. When she notified them of these incidents, they asked who she thought was responsible.
Mayor Wu was able to name names. Which strikes one as a little odd, given that the incidents of harassment perhaps were more of the “I hate you from the curb and hurl epithets at you as I drive by” variety rather than the, “Hello, I’m Joe Bags of 2832 S Main Street and I think your policies are really bad” variety.
Nevertheless, the mayor was able to produce a fairly comprehensive rendition of what in any other political structure might be called an Enemies List, which she gave to the police — the police department that works for her and serves at her pleasure — to result in… Well, we don’t know exactly what it will or has resulted in.
But now, we do know that Boston’s Finest is on the job, armed with the Mayor’s Enemies List. And also armed with ticket books, patrol cars, investigators, lawyers, handcuffs and firearms.
We shall see what sort of protection from these unique enemies this sort of police protection can provide.
The Alligator News Roundup